Good morning. Microsoft Corp.'s cloud-computing businesses kicked into high gear, as sales of its Azure service more than doubled, the WSJ's Jay Greene reports. Overall revenue, which has slid for each of the past five quarters, also grew in the period, the WSJ said.

Microsoft ranks second in selling computing power and data storage capacity on demand over the internet. Amazon.com Inc. has a huge lead with 31% of the market, according to a recent survey from Synergy Research Group. the WSJ reports. Microsoft has an 11% share of the market for infrastructure as a service, reflecting major investments in the construction of data centers around the world.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said the growth reflected the migration of the cloud from Silicon Valley into the mainstream of computing. “It’s not just the Silicon Valley startups anymore, it is the core enterprise that is also becoming a digital company,” he said Thursday during a conference call. To what extent are workloads in your company moving to the cloud, and how is that changing your business? Let us know.

VMware CIO Bask Iyer named interim Dell CIO. Bask Iyer, chief information officer and IoT manager at VMware Inc., has been named interim CIO of Dell Inc., the company formed after the combination of Dell and EMC Corp. He fills in for Chief Information Officer ML Krakauer, who is taking a temporary leave of absence for “personal reasons,” a Dell spokesman tells CIO Journal's Steven Norton. The spokesman could not provide detail on how long Ms. Krakauer is expected to be out.

TECH EARNINGS

Bloomberg News

SAP raises guidance as profit slides. SAP SE Friday raised its guidance for 2016, even after it reported a 19% slide in net profit for the third quarter, the Journal's Christopher Alessi reports. The German business software provider said it now expects full-year operating profit to be in a range of €6.5 billion to €6.7 billion ($7.1 billion to $7.3 billion), compared with €6.35 billion in 2015.

AMD posts revenue increase.Advanced Micro Devices Inc. on Thursday reported a second consecutive quarter of higher sales, fueled by customized processors for videogame makers and demand for its latest graphics chips, the Journal's Maria Armental and Don Clark report. But the company’s loss widened as it booked a $340 million charge tied to the most recent changes to its agreement with the company that manufactures most of the chips it designs.

MORE TECHNOLOGY NEWS

National Security Agency headquarters in Fort Meade, Md.

Bloomberg News

Ex-NSA contractor stole at least 500 million pages of records and secrets, U.S. says. The Justice Department alleged in a court filing submitted Thursday that Harold “Hal” Martin III, most recently a contractor at Booz Allen Hamilton Holding Corp., amassed at least 50 terabytes of government records by stealing documents bit by bit over two decades. Mr. Martin worked on highly sensitive programs, people familiar with the investigation have said, including cyberweapons that were in development. The Journal's Damian Paletta notes that the filing doesn’t indicate whether Mr. Martin shared any of the stolen classified information with another person or another country.

Slack growth slows.TechCrunch says that Slack, the popular chat-based productivity tool is seeing a drop off in growth, and that "the GIF-filled workplace chat app can get noisy and distracting for bigger companies, and have trouble scaling." Uber Technologies Inc. for example, dropped Slack in April. In a blog post Thursday Slack said it had four million active users as of October.

Apple says many ‘genuine’ Apple products on Amazon are fake. Apple Inc. says it has been buying Apple chargers and cables labeled as genuine on Amazon.com Inc.'s e-commerce site and has found nearly 90 percent of them to be counterfeit, the Associated Press reports.

Valley VC firm welcomes female partner. Silicon Valley venture firm Sequoia Capital has named Jess Lee, CEO at shopping and fashion site Polyvore, its 11th partner, When she starts in November Ms. Lee will be in the firm's first female partner in the firm's 44-year history, Bloomberg reports.

SpaceX probe into blast focuses on fueling issues. Investigators believe operational issues linked to fueling procedures, rather than a manufacturing flaw, likely caused a Space Exploration Technologies rocket to explode during ground tests last month. If testing bears out early findings, focusing on problematic fueling practices instead of hardware flaws, Space Explorations Technology Corp. likely will avoid a major redesign effort or extensive quality-control checks that could drag on for months, the Journal's Andy Pasztor says.

Tesla sets price for self-driving feature. Tesla Motors plans to charge buyers of its newest cars $8,000 to activate autonomous-driving technology, the WSJ's Tim Higgins reports. The $8,000 price covers the software to enable a new hardware option, called Full Self-Driving Capability, which will cost $10,000 if purchased separately from the vehicle. The hardware includes front-facing radar, 12 sonar sensors, and eight cameras. The previous semiautonomous hardware included one camera.The automaker also plans to roll out a ride services program. Details will be announced next year, Reuters reports.

Taser maker considers drone use.Taser International Inc., known for its stun guns and body cameras, is exploring the concept of a drone armed with a stun gun for use by police, a move likely to generate backlash from those opposed to the militarization of police as tensions are already high over recent police violence, the WSJ's Zusha Elinson reports.

Nintendo says new console debuts March 2017.Nintendo Co. hopes Switch,a console hand-held hybrid, will connect with consumers who mostly turned their backs on the Wii U console, the last big introduction of its hardware. Analysts tell the WSJ that if Switch disappoints, pressure would rise on Nintendo to focus on making games for rival platforms rather than sinking money into consoles that take years to develop.

WHAT YOUR CEO IS READING

Reuters

Every week, CIO Journal offers a glimpse into the mind of the CEO, whose view of technology is shaped by stories in management journals, general interest magazines and, of course, in-flight publications.

Breaking through the glass ceiling with F-bombs. Diane Bryant, executive vice president at Intel Corp., credits skillful deployment of expletives with her ability to thrive in the male-dominated engineering culture. “I would literally throw the F word out every now and then just randomly,” said Ms Bryant, recalling her early days as an electrical engineer at the chip maker. “This one guy throws out the F word, and then stops and turns to me—all eyes on me, 23-years-old—and says ‘Oh, I’m sorry.’ And I said ‘no f-ing problem,’” she told attendees Wednesday at a Fortune conference in California. Ms. Bryant said she also starting drinking scotch.

Will the children of today’s helicopter parents have the verve to run tomorrow’s boardroom? Can risk takers emerge from a generation weaned on playdates, Bisphenol-free baby bottles and everyone-gets-a-trophy athletic leagues? “Children whose time is highly structured — crammed with lessons and adult-supervised activities — may have more difficulty developing their own 'executive function' capabilities, the ability to devise their own plans and carry them out,” Melanie Thernstrom writes in a New York Times. Anti-helicopter parent Mike Lanza, an entrepreneur with three degrees from Stanford, has transformed his Silicon Valley backyard into a gladiator pit for neighborhood kids complete with structures that typically ship with a waiver of liability form. “As a libertarian, one of the biggest problems we have in American society is that children don’t have enough freedom,” he said. Mr. Lanza blames overprotective moms for depriving kids of danger. Moms, many of whom work and often have no option but to pay for structured afterschool care—thanks in parts to cuts in free programs over the years--were too busy to comment.

Movement fights technology addition. “The closest thing Silicon Valley has to a conscience,” is a 32-year-old drop-out of Stanford University Persuasive Technology Lab, famous in the Valley for experimental psychologist B. J. Fogg’s work on “behavior design,” the nicotine, so to speak, powering some of tech’s most addictive social media websites. Tristan Harris, through his San Francisco organization Time Well Spent, wants technology companies to instill “moral integrity” into their code that “would check the practice of 'exposing people’s psychological vulnerabilities' and restore 'agency' to users.” Among his ideas is an a “focus mode” for Gmail that pauses incoming messages until the user has finished concentrating on a task. The Atlantic’s Bianca Bosker wonders if the tech world—for all its talk about mindulness and consciousness-can ever take it seriously. Says a former Google designer about Mr. Harris’s work: “It was one of those things where there’s a lot of head nods, and then people go back to work.”